The use of wireless communication devices continues to become more ubiquitous in modern societies. The substantial increase in the use of wireless devices is driven, in part, by the devices' increasing abilities. While wireless devices were once used only to communicate voice and text, their ability to display audiovisual presentations has driven the need to be able to transmit and receive pictures, information related to games, television, movies, and so forth.
One way of increasing the amount of data that can be communicated is through the use of carrier aggregation. Carriers are signals in permitted frequency domains onto which information is placed. The amount of information that can be placed on a carrier is determined by the carrier's bandwidth. The permitted frequency domains are often limited in bandwidth. The bandwidth limitations become more severe when a large number of users are simultaneously using the bandwidth in the permitted frequency domains.
Carrier aggregation enables multiple carrier signals to be simultaneously communicated between a user's wireless device and a base station. Multiple different carriers can be used. In some instances, the carriers may be from different permitted frequency domains. This provides a broader choice to the wireless devices, enabling more bandwidth to be obtained. The greater bandwidth can be used to communicate bandwidth intensive operations, such as streaming video or large data files.
Various wireless standards have been drafted that enable wireless communication devices to be interoperable. However, the wireless standards are not complete in defining the information that needs to be exchanged between wireless devices and base stations to allow carrier aggregation to take place in a mobile wireless communication system.